


Our Bruises Are Coming

by sexonastick



Category: Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
Genre: BDSM, Bondage, Canon Gay Relationship, F/F, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-26
Updated: 2010-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:54:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sexonastick/pseuds/sexonastick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maud fulfills the role of teacher for Sue, but still has much to learn herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our Bruises Are Coming

**Author's Note:**

> Alternating points of view (which includes alternating tenses), just like in the novel. It's pretty easy to follow, though, I think.
> 
> Originally written 7/24/08.

She would often sit with herself close to the fire and a book in her lap. There would be a look upon her face at times that set my heart racing harder. It was a _knowing_ sort of look, and that was the only way I had to think of it then. She moved her eyes across the page just as she moved them over my breast when we lay in bed with the candle still lit.

It might have been the fire that would make her eyes flash so wild, but it seemed to come from somewhere deeper underneath her skin.

Maud turned the page and the look never changed. I tried to imagine what things she might be reading. I knew most of the books she owned were usually of the same sort. They all had women falling prey to either their own urges or to men acting upon needs.

Sometimes Maud read aloud so that I didn't have to imagine what she saw. I listened quietly and learned that men have _needs_ to be met with action and women have _lusts_ and urges that are like feelings. The urges worked like a flame or tiny butterfly. They sounded small and orderly like stitches to fabric, and could be plucked away just as easily. They were something to be shaped and the men, with all their thrusting and touching of flesh, knew how.

I had never felt anything like what she described at all.

I found that what Maud read of men was much more to my own nature. Their needs would come upon them like a fever, sweaty and rough, and a man would work himself against a woman until the need had passed through him. It was often that way with Maud, and it was especially so in the beginning.

It came over me like a sudden rush. I looked at her and felt myself weak. My head grew light, but my hand was steady when it settled between both thighs. She made noises like sighs and I was ready to catch each with my tongue.

Her eyes knew how to dance with a fire that was their own. It spread down into her smile just so, twisting it a little, and I asked her to read for me again. Instead she went quiet and still, as if not daring to breathe.

I hadn't seen that look in her eyes since we began our shared life alone. It was fear.

I felt such a responsibility for her then -- being the only thing like a family she had left, though I suppose it could be true that she was the same to me -- and so I changed the subject to the rain the day before. Later when she pulled out a new and different book entirely, I pretended not to notice the change.

 

It became harder to pretend the more I saw her do it. I had quite enough of mystery in that time we'd spent apart. There seemed no cause to add any more to our lives, and so I told Maud one day that I would learn to read so I might come to know her better.

She smiled and looked at me in a way I think might have been tenderness or pity. More likely if it were both. She said we kept no books in our house that a real lady might properly learn from.

'I ain't a lady,' I said, thinking myself quite clever, but she only laughed.

This was a time when I still had my pride as it was still early on. You will come to know, as I think everyone does, that there are few things in the world even half as humbling as a love that eats you from the inside out. It's like a flame taking to a wick, and that was her to me. She looked at me at times like she was a woman hadn't eaten in days and I was a spread dinner all laid out for her, with trimmings. Sometimes she touched like I was her clothes or any other thing both belonging to her and familiar.

She said my mind was still too pure to learn of things this way. No one had ever called me pure before, and my cheeks burned to hear it. As I said, I still had my pride.

'There's plenty I knew before I ever come to Briar,' I said. 'And haven't I learned enough from you that you'd know not to call me lady?'

She laughed again and kissed me, I think to stop my arguing. She kissed until I'd lost control over my breath and even my own thinking. All my sense was lost from me, though the softness of her mouth told me I still kept a sense of touch.

 

We went to bed the next three days with everything as it had been.

There was a man Maud had been meeting in private who wished, she said, to act as publisher. She was to use the assumed name of a man as author. He had advised her that this was normal for writing from women. These books are bought by gentlemen and students, she said, and none of them could help but blush to know these words were written by a lady.

The news made her sick with worry, like her stomach had been tied in knots and then coated over with iron. Even her steps were heavy, dragged down I suppose by the weight in her belly.

I told her I liked nothing about her having to meet him so often alone, but she tutted and tried to calm me.

'Sue, I've known men like him all my life,' she said.

I laughed in a way both sharp at its edges but hearty too, just to show I took no real offense by it and could not be made to feel uncertain. I'd known men like him too, and said so. 'And better are we both to know fewer now.' I thought this a pretty fair point, and I'm sure she did too because of how slow she was to answer.

But still, Maud wouldn't listen. That was a habit I think she learned in her former life, and giving in was one I knew too well. It was a type of strategy. I gave her that small victory to better gather up my resources for a full assault on the secrets she kept from me.

But she sprang her own surprise before I had mine fully prepared.

She had spent every night since finding out she was to be published in a state of restlessness. Every surface in the bedroom had to be touched once and then touched again as she made the rounds, nearly turning in circles, before returning to bed exhausted.

I'd seen dogs do that, too. The fiercer ones who lived in nearby alleys and fought off kids for scraps would strut with stiff legs around their territory and rub against things they thought they owned. I would lay still, so as not to disturb her, and enfold her in my arms when she was ready. She'd rub against me then, whining, and fall quickly to sleep.

 

Night four came with a surprise. As usual she was roaming our room, making noise as she moved about touching and inspecting, with me pretending I was asleep. I found that she moved easier if she didn't think I was watching.

She certainly moved easy that night.

I heard her creeping back close to the bed and offered her my arm as an embrace only to have her take hold of it and tug. She was already knotting my wrist to the headboard and moving on to the second before my eyes had opened fully and adjusted to the dark.

'... what?' My confusion was all there was. I couldn't begin to understand what was happening, and it's only now I think that I can even put it to words. So total was my lack of understanding that I stared at the rope around my own wrist and still had to tug at it twice and feel the burn to know that it really was mine.

I did it again and the headboard rattled.

'Oh, Sue.'

My mouth was a circle with no sound to come out. I rattled the bed again, this time with a pull on both wrists.

'Shhh.' Maud laughed and her eyes flashed in the moonlight. 'Still not very good at soft, are you?'

I tried to think of what this might be. What is rope used for? All I could think was for keeping someone captive. But kidnapping in my own home by the very lady I already shared everything with -- including key to the front door -- didn't seem likely.

The other possibility was so terrible, so dark and black that my mind reeled to even look upon it briefly. Could I have woken up mad again? Perhaps Maud had been forced to this for my own good. Might I have attacked her?

I think the fear must have shown on my face, because Maud was quickly upon me in a flurry of lips and fingers. She held me down and smiled.

So not madness then.

 

She had a way of breathing so close to my mouth that it seemed we were like one lung shared between each other. She kissed my cheek and soothed me with sounds like whispers and gentle strokes of her fingers up and down my wrists.

She lay herself more firmly atop me and I cried out suddenly at how my body stretched against its bonds. The pain was very little, but the shock was great. Here was something new.

I thought she must have dreamed this up in a sort of frenzy. The way her body held mine down produced a feeling in me unlike any I had known before. It was like fear, but warm and thick in the middle. Like the soft underbelly of terror, unassuming and small at first but with heart beat quickening close to the surface.

Maud's hands played across me, down my ribs and to the inside of my thigh, and I thought _'I am helpless'_ with a sudden shock so clear and sharp it was like a blade dragged across bone. The girl inside me raised on London's streets who knew to cover her tracks and check around corners reared up to the surface of my skin, taking hold of me in terror. I jerked and trembled like a bird caught in some trap.

When another tug produced no give, I couldn't help but notice my own dim appreciation of the craftsmanship. The thought appeared completely unwanted and unbidden to the back of my brain to float. I knew knots well enough, but how did she? These were better than any I could do, and I knew it right away. Like how I'd watched the boys come to the shop and practice with picking certain harder locks with eyes closed, I couldn't help but be impressed.

It was the books. I know that now. They write _books_ about these things.

 _She_ writes books about these things.

 

*

Everything of the world I know has come from books. Even what little I have known of freedom was purchased most costly for me by a man who came to me by way of books. Sheaves of paper are my master and threads of ink still bind my wrists. The stains of long nights spent working fade from my skin with the passing hours, but nothing changes who I am.

There was a time, long ago does it seem now, when I told Sue how much she seemed like my own sister. It meant little to me at the time other than a means to set the beginnings of our trap for her, or so I thought to myself. It was one lie in a time that was filled with so little of truth except that which I couldn't keep hidden from my own heart.

How much like sisters we found ourselves to be in the collisions of our past, and yet how much more than that are we now in the wrapping up of our lives and hearts like knots in twine.

My mouth is filled with poison. My uncle raised me on a diet of deceit and debauchery and then handed me a mirror so that I might come to know myself. Though our lives have changed incredibly, Sue and mine, I still think of him often as _my_ uncle. Time has taught me not to deny the memory of my true mother, but I must confess -- though never aloud, not even with Sue -- to a second birthing of sorts not all too unlike the Christian one. But where a repentant sinner might be washed in the blood of the Holy Spirit and given life anew, I was birthed again through the spine of a book with parentheses as my placenta. Awakened to new sensations and thoughts while still entirely defenseless, I was so much like a child with an understanding only as evolved as that of an infant.

Perhaps it is easier then to understand how little I knew of what I might become capable of or how far my own desires might take me.

Not all poisons kill quickly. There are many that consume over time. The deadliest perhaps are those which do not cause a heart to stop, but instead slowly dement the senses of their victim. There are frogs like that, I think. When eaten they might make a predatory creature blind. What could be more tragic than a fox that cannot see that the poultry is a trap?

I have snares all around me. The most deadly are the ones I keep as part of my skin. I might take hold of Sue by way of a hand merely passing along the folds of her dress, and I feel her go still. There is that cord between us, keeping us tied close, and when I try to pull away she always follows at my heels.

Sue doesn't know how wet her eyes can look when she's lost in her own wanting. She's like a doll at times, with eyes like glass and lips ever on the verge of parting. I watch her and think of words and clips of phrases I have seen etched thick and dark on pale pages or ones I have spoken aloud to a room of eager men.

Their heavy breath would clog the air until the words all seemed slick and rounded at their edges. They nestled in the shell of my ear and there they stayed, only to return years later while my hand sits on the pulse in Sue's breast.

It beats wildly and I think, _eager bitch_. I think _wanton spreading of her thighs_ and _incline of hips thrusting_. I think _blooming in purple like an angry red flower on her cheek_ and feel my own heart race to join hers.

My head is filled with poison.

This is a poison that I am much immune to. I am so accustomed to the way it works itself upon my mind that I cannot see the world twisting at its edges.

I sometimes watch Sue going about the simplest daily task and I imagine she is utterly naked, with not even a stitch to wear. I tell myself she must look at me while I read or walk and think the same, but I know this to be false. She has not had her fill of poison yet. My kisses are very slow acting; just look how she slows when she tastes them.

There's a catalog of vices kept locked up in my brain with cross references to the heart and gut. Certain footnotes go even lower.

I've read of men who keep their women completely naked in the home. Always the women are _theirs_ like a possession who bears their ownership like skin, which is nothing like my own stubborn Sue. But are such men even real? I have met the men who read of such things, and I have come to know them better now in places outside of books.

Their lives are much more boring than mine. Their lives are much simpler than any book.

Sue asks me what I'm reading and I feel a certain compulsion toward honesty. I might turn the page and start to read aloud, saying, _'where she lifts her skirt for all to see the marks that I have left,'_ and what will she say then?

She's as curious as a cat, always licking her lips and so very pleased with herself. She thinks she knows what lies at the center of me just because she has reached for it with her fingers.

I sometimes think I should like to skin her just to hear her yowling. But when she asks again, I simply change the topic to the weather.

 

She is teaching me to cook. Neither of us has had a full education in the matter, but she has spent more time in observation of the craft.

She shows me how to carve meat and which way best to hold the blade. Sue wraps her hands around mine to direct them. She hardly seems to notice the contact anymore, even when I twist my fingers so that our knuckles drag together.

Her hands are larger than mine, with longer fingers. Each one looks like it might be its own blade to a knife. She runs them up my back while in bed or twists them in my hair. She's always gentle, though.

Sue still helps me to dress some mornings, though I don't need it. At first, I thought it some kind of joke. Her idea of humor isn't always obvious to others. She teases me for so many things.

We wake up in our bed and I can feel where she has breathed against me all night. There's a chill on my skin when she pulls back. She stands slowly, stretching with arms above her head, and she smiles.

She brings water before my eyes have even opened fully and reaches for my arms, my wrists, to lift my gown up so that I am left shivering and bare. I stand before her naked, more aware of it than I once had been.

Sue moves more slowly washing me than she ever had before. I shiver again and she says, 'easy now, miss,' in a quiet way that I think is meant for teasing. I see the tip of her tongue when she speaks and her sharp fingers hold me steady with one hand against my thigh.

Perhaps the poison is there and moving faster than I thought. When I am naked, I see her looking. Her eyes round the corner of my bosom before drifting lower still.

She watches me breathe.

I cannot help but wonder if she stared while dressing me before and it simply escaped my notice. I refer to that time at Briar even before my own breathing seemed to quicken when she drew close. I mean that time before my own awareness.

I am always aware of her now.

 

I have to come to think of Sue as clever in ways I know others cannot see. It was in their design for her that she should be made and kept as simple, just as I was to be sharpened for a different purpose. Not one of my own choosing, you must remember, but that which has been thrust upon me.

We are both so much the product of other people's industry. If I must be a book then she is a chair. Outside forces work themselves upon us even now. Others should like to sit and use her until she breaks to be tossed aside, just as they wish to split me open for inspection. To them I am only notations to be read aloud so that gentlemen might clap politely.

To her, I am something else. She watches me when I am naked but also when I am clothed. She listens when I read, and I see her close her eyes and sigh as if lost in her own thinking.

I sometimes wish to crawl inside her head to stay. I should like to know what it is to be so much at peace.

She watches me with an open look that settles in her eye and seems to reflect to the very depths of her. I suppose I must call that trust. Her brow is so smooth and untroubled for much of the time we spend together. It's strange to feel my own heart's relief at how much she has taken to smiling again.

I remember her in the kitchen at Lant Street. We still have never returned there, but we each hold a map of it clearly in our minds. She might guide me through a simple task in preparing a meal and her hand drifts to a counter that is not there. Her eyes move toward a place where we do not keep the knives, but I think she still sees a glint of steel.

I feel myself having to touch her. Sue frowns and the room seems colder. It's an expression so unfamiliar on her face and I can see that even she is confused to find herself so troubled.

My need to touch her overwhelms all other impulses. I know that it must seem strange. Perhaps if I were someone other than myself or if Sue were simply some other girl, I wouldn't find myself so ill at ease in moments where I imagine her leaving. She will return to Lant Street or find a home in one of the nicest parts of London where she meets with gentlemen callers. She will live on without me, and she will be better for the loss.

I tighten my grip on her wrist to keep her close. She shall have to make her escape some other day.

 

*

I laid trapped beneath her until morning, but woke to find my wrists free if somewhat sore.

There were bruises to mark each way and angle she had thrust herself upon me.

You think I exaggerate. How could I?

So many of my hours in that week were spent in careful examination of my own skin. Every mark was well and clearly recorded upon my brain before it had time to fade. I knew the place where my pulse meets the heel of my palm better than I had ever known any part of myself.

I knew it as I knew her.

 

Maud said nothing about that night and would barely touch my arms at all until the marks had gone. She took hold of me by the fabric of my dress and pulled.

That is how desperate she had become. Proper ladies never treat clothes in that manner. Only people.

She allowed her hands the luxury to abuse fine fabrics in place of my flesh and I was allowed time to heal. Her kisses were chaste and gentle.

I ached for want of her touch.

 

*

I think Sue clever in untold ways, but at the foundation she remains simple.

Though perhaps that is not the word I mean. It holds too much malice and presents the trait as undesirable when that is not the case at all.

I desire it very much, nearly as strongly as I desire her.

She is simple. She is like a chair. She is clean and well-made and no matter how the circumstances of our childhoods would have liked to warp her like wet and rotting wood, she is still so straight in many ways.

I think she must have made a terrible thief.

To call her simple can't be right. It's too unlike any feeling I have ever had toward Sue. Even at her very worst, she is difficult to despise. You must believe me, for I have tried.

When she kisses me, I think she does it with her tongue and pieces of her chest but seldom with her head. I do not mean this to sound cruel. I envy her that.

Her kisses come from her own mouth, while mine are formed from a thousand words at once. I kiss with the borrowed mouth of every character I have ever read. I kiss all the harder for it, as if intensity can displace the unwanted intrusions from within mine own self.

In the midst of sucking on her lower lip, I see that I have left bruises with my teeth. I am surprised by my own fascination. I imagine what it would have been to break the skin and taste parts of her inside me.

I can't help but think how close I sometimes come to taking aspects of her as my own, as if innocence is a virus to be shared from mouth to mouth. I think it is quite the opposite.

Slowly but surely, I am corrupting her.

 

Though tragic, it cannot be helped. It cannot be prevented most simply because I do not want to stop.

Sue wants to learn to read. I finally agree to teach her. I bring home other books, innocent books, and I watch her struggle in the weeks and months ahead.

I am patient as I am with no one else. She works her finger across the page to keep her place and I try to watch with her rather than stare at the way the edges of her mouth move when she anxiously chews her own hair. Eventually I brush it away, though my hand lingers there at her cheek. I stroke the curve of her ear and down to her lips.

'Be a good girl now, Sue,' I say, gently chiding. 'Concentrate.'

'Yes, miss.' She does not even notice her own mistake.

She is so vulnerable like this, lost in concentration. She is not used to being so much in her head when my hands are upon her. It makes her dizzy and shy. When she looks at me, she does it through her eyelashes, ever at the verge of glancing away to safety.

But there is nothing to keep her safe here.

She is so much like a character in some book. She struggles to learn it and though she makes good progress, she is easily embarrassed. I have never seen her so self-conscious and unsure. I'm ashamed to say that I find myself enjoying it.

So much like a novel is she that I know easily what must come next. Once she knows her letters well enough, I set her to writing them down. She is given sentences to write. I recite them aloud and she jots them carefully with ink.

I am lenient at first. She succeeds in every task and her smile makes my heart constrict. I ache with my own knowledge of who and what I am. What I will do.

One day the task is a simple _'we must work hard'_ and the next it's set to: _'satisfaction derives from continued excellence'_.

Sue stares at me with those wide eyes. I think it must be trust that makes them seem so clear. She hardly wavers watching me, though I see now her eyes grow wet as she blinks. She struggles and looks away. She bites her lip.

I cough. 'You find this difficult?'

She says nothing and my heart twists again. I sit closely, take her hand in mine though hers is nearly twice the size, and I squeeze.

Finally, she looks again. She looks about to speak and so I kiss her.

'There now,' I whisper, and my lip catches hers while I speak, that is how close we have lingered together. 'You have been trying, haven't you? Have you been practicing without me?'

'Yes.'

She's so quiet I think I must be imagining the sound in my own head. I already know the words.

'Have you really, though? Do you think you've tried hard enough, Sue?' There's something to the stiffness of her shoulders that makes me think she must suspect. The sentence is obviously a trap. I have trapped her, and not for the first time. I work so hard to earn back her trust and here is what I do with it.

Yet she says nothing.

I stand again and start to pace. Sue's eyes are on me, and I can feel them. She's watching every move as I cross the floor to examine stacks of books on our shelves.

But certain titles and my own familiarity with their contents only confuses the matter further. Here are the ingredients of deceit. Here is corruption. My heart twists again, like a blade deep in wood. You can splitter and break it if you gouge enough times.

I turn to her again. I try to stay steady. I wish to seem calm, but I'm sure that she must see the rising pulse of my heartbeat striking against my forehead. I have still never learned to keep mine smooth and untroubled as Sue does.

She smiles a little then and I'm sure she's found me out.

Still she says nothing. The room stands still until, at last, I clear my throat. 'I think--' I try to begin, but my voice sounds small and unresolved. I start again, this time imagining I am reading from a text to a room full of scholars.

It is a difficult charade to maintain when I feel the heat settle over my thighs.

 

*

When she would kiss me, touch me, Maud knew me better than anyone else.

But she was still good at forgetting me. She would remember my presence in any room, but let entire parts slip from her gaze. She imagined herself the real thief because of how she had fooled me before.

I cared for her like I did for my own arm or leg, but that was never the same as being foolish. I'd learned that lesson well enough already.

 

Maud said she'd be teaching me to read and brought home books to do it with. She praised me for my progress and kissed my hair. She stroked my cheek and then left to meet that man, her publisher, again.

I don't know why I felt a need to sneak so quiet and carefully even with her gone from the house. I suppose it still felt a bit like Briar when I looked at the titles of Maud's own books. I imagined Mr. Lilly would come to life and strike me for pulling one loose from the shelf.

But I did it anyway.

Maud might have been proud of how I'd progressed in my reading, but there was nothing there like much of what I found in these pages. They might as well have been in Greek. I flipped through more, spotting here and there a word like _this_ or _strength_ , which I knew by sight.

Others repeated themselves throughout the text but were nothing more than lines to me. I know them now, of course, but at the time we'd not had any cause to encounter the likes of _turgid_ in our studies.

Then I came upon the drawings. In one book in particular, near the back, there were sketches laid on the page in ink. They were of a girl even younger than myself bent over a desk with a man nearby with a switch.

Of course I knew what punishment looked like. Though Mrs. Sucksby had been easy in how she handled me, I'd seen enough beatings handed out to know one just on sight.

But I knew what type of book this was as well. These books were all about the _urges_ and the _needs_ of the flesh -- and most especially that flesh which resides between the thighs, not behind them. What does a beating have to do with that?

 

She thought me foolish because I was honest in a way that only thieves are. That is we know when best to lie for our own gain and are mostly direct the rest of the time. I didn't see a reason to waste any energy on hiding when I was home with her.

Still, she thought me innocent and unsuspecting. I know because of how the surprise showed clearly on her face when I stood and lifted my dress for her, every layer. I bent forward over the desk we had been using for my lessons and laid my hands flat. I tried imagining her face in that moment when the room went utterly still and silent. I could have looked, but thought it might ruin the effect.

Only when I heard a noise that might have been her saying my name did I bother to turn and look. The small glance I sent back along my shoulder and past the lifted layers of ruffles laid out across my backside made her inhale sharply. I could hear it clear as if she'd been breathing against my ear.

 

It stung more than expected. This wasn't like the ropes, which had been small and sharp prickles in one place. This was a burning that landed flat with a noise and then spread. It drifted down the backs of my legs and burned in the strained arch of my feet. It ached in how the muscles of my arms and back tensed and wouldn't let up though I struggled for them to obey me and relax.

Especially it burned my arse something awful. It spread and then it circled back, working around and around in a circle. The heat was so much I felt it in my thighs. I felt it between my thighs. I felt it in my mouth when I licked my lips over and over before biting until I nearly bled.

 

*

Nothing matches this feeling. She shakes under me. Every strike and her body feels it. I feel it. My hand grows sore and her flesh warm.

These circumstances are not entirely new. I struck Agnes before, of course. She had also called me 'miss' and had been kind in her own clumsy way. I hit her until she cried out, and I took pleasure from it. That had happened. That came before.

This is different. Though Sue cries with tiny yelps, mouth quivering, she does not jerk away from me. If anything, I find her pushing back even closer to the contact with my hand. Our skins are drawn together like magnets and I find my hand moves as if of its own free will to trace patterns over the red marks I've left behind.

She hisses like a poisonous snake, bending the entirety of her back as she shifts in place above the table. I hike her dress even further to pin it in place with my torso when I lean to kiss the sweat from her throat.

The quiet noises she makes are almost inhuman.

I lean closer to listen. I think that I might hear something, some word of protest or a muffled cry for help. But the only sound is hearts beating, and I cannot tell hers from my own.

 

*

She whispered to me things that were nothing like words I knew from any language.

It was like print on a page used to be: filled with meaning of some sort, but foreign to me just the same. Then she pressed her head against my own and our breaths mingled together, as did our sweat. Our hair clung in tiny strands pinned between both foreheads.

I felt her shiver carry across the full of my back, bumping and crowding up against my own speeding up heartbeat, and it was like a key fit to a lock.

In an instant I knew her meaning well enough, real words or otherwise.

Something about the knowing made me feel light headed. The suddenness of it made me dizzy. I wanted to laugh.

This was what her look had been. I'd found the place she'd tried to hide.

Here it was, all along, in the space between where our mouths meet.

 


End file.
